Elegant Monsters

Behind Rick Owens’s rock-and-roll look.

Owens, with his fur consultant and a fitting model, is the foremost purveyor of what he has called “glunge” (grunge plus glamour). Photograph by Miles Aldridge.

One Friday morning last September, Valentine, a tall blond Dutch model, arrived at the studio of Rick Owens, the American fashion designer, who lives and works in a five-story mansion on the Place du Palais Bourbon, in central Paris. It was two days before the beginning of Fashion Week, and Valentine, who had been selected by Owens as a fitting model, would spend the morning trying on garments from his Spring 2008 collection, which was to be presented at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts on Sunday. Owens has been showing his label on the runway for just six years, but since the late nineties stylish women—including Helena Bonham Carter, Ellen Barkin, Angelina Jolie, and (lately) the Olsen twins—have been wearing his long, clingy T-shirts, elegantly asymmetrical dresses, and skinny-armed leather jackets, which are in constant demand at Barneys. Owens, a forty-six-year-old California native, whose deceptively casual designs combine luxury fabrics—ostrich, gazar, organza, and pleated eelskin—with meticulous, highly unconventional construction, has become the foremost purveyor of what he has called “glunge” (grunge plus glamour). He has acquired a following that could be described as cultlike or exclusive, were it not for the fact that he sells tens of millions of dollars’ worth of clothes each year, in more than two hundred and fifty high-end fashion stores around the world. This summer, he will open a boutique in downtown Manhattan, his first in the United States.

Valentine glanced around nervously as she entered Owens’s building, a staid, neoclassical pile that he and his wife, Michèle Lamy, who is French, bought in 2004. François Mitterrand once had an office on the first floor. The interior, however, suggests a gut demolition in progress, though it has already been given as much of a makeover as Owens intends, since he likes to work in surroundings that reflect his aesthetic of—as he has put it—“broken idealism.” Except for some wedding-cake moldings in a few rooms, including Mitterrand’s former office, he has stripped the place of its original details. The walls, shorn of wallpaper, are crumbling; the floors are dusty concrete slabs; and the ceilings are a tangle of ducts, wires, and pipes. On the top floor are Owens and Lamy’s living quarters: a cavernous room furnished with an armchair, a TV screen mounted on a black plywood cube, and a bed, designed by Owens, with a U-shaped, six-foot-high headboard upholstered in brown wool felt—a sample from his furniture collection, which he would be presenting to the public at a Paris art gallery the following week. At the entrance to the room was a shower: a concrete platform with a drain in the center and no walls.

Valentine met Owens in his third-floor studio, a long, low room with windows covered by Swiss Army blankets, broken ceiling beams, and five racks of clothes, which had arrived that morning from the factory in Italy where Owens’s label is produced. On a table at one end of the room, a laptop was playing the Ramones song “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” Owens, who was eying the racks when Valentine arrived, was dressed in clothes that he had designed: a sleeveless black T-shirt made of fraying silk (exposing gym-pumped arms, adorned in tattoos), baggy black shorts, and, beneath the shorts, gray sweatpants with inside-out seams, the ragged ends tucked into unlaced, hand-sewn, leather high-tops, which sell for twelve hundred dollars. Long straight hair, dyed black, framed his face, which is dominated by large dark eyes; he looks uncannily like Iggy Pop. Once, when he was asked by an interviewer to name his “teenage desire,” Owens, who is bisexual, replied, “To fuck Iggy Pop.” Having failed in that goal—“I met Iggy only once,” he told me, “in a tacky Mexican drag bar in L.A.: a little, shrivelled, ugly guy on the dance floor with an Asian woman. But that’s the way to meet him”—Owens did his best, he explained, “to turn into Iggy Pop.” This ambition extended beyond straightening and dying his hair, which is naturally curly and prematurely white. Like Iggy, for many years Owens indulged in drugs and alcohol (mostly speed, cocaine, and vodka), in amounts that, before he stopped cold turkey, in the early nineties, nearly killed him.

He immediately put Valentine at ease. “Is this your first time doing the Paris shows?” he asked. She said that it was.

“Are people nice to you?” he asked.

“Well, the designers tend to be awfully busy and they see a lot of girls,” she replied.

“Yeah,” Owens said. “They can be so dismissive.”

A few moments later, Valentine emerged from the fitting room wearing a gauzy tunic with a folded neckline designed to stand away from the nape, but she had put the garment on backward. “You know, it actually looks sorta good that way,” Owens said softly. She reappeared in a long black skirt, and Owens knelt in front of her to adjust the unfinished hem.

“Gee,” he said, looking up. “Are you extra tall?”

“No,” she said. “One hundred and eighty-one centimetres”—that is, about five feet eleven inches, standard for a model.

“So you’re not a freak,” Owens said.

“No! Thank you,” she said.

“Oh, yes, you are,” he countered.

She flushed and frowned, failing to comprehend that, for Owens, “freak” is a compliment of the highest order.

Owens has built a multimilliondollar business out of a talent for infusing garments with the poignant beauty that resides in imperfection. Courtney Love, the lead singer of Hole, was among the first celebrities to discover Owens, in the late nineties, shortly after he launched his label, which consisted mainly of machine-washed leather jackets, threadbare cashmere T-shirts, and artfully frayed hoodies. “He was so idiosyncratic and such an iconoclast—early,” Love says. “You would know someone was cool because they were wearing Rick Owens. Other than Marc Jacobs, he’s the only brand I’m going to wear onstage.”

In an industry driven by the impulse to allay boredom at all costs—through recourse to sudden color shifts and extreme changes in silhouettes and hemlines—Owens, who studied fine art in Los Angeles but never attended design school, has steadfastly pursued an anti-fashion ethic. His basic look—“drippy” forms in subdued colors that range from “dust” to “dark shadow”—changes little from season to season. He has used the word “monotony” to describe his work and has compared it to Lou Reed’s music: “minimal chord changes, and direct.” He gives few interviews, does not employ a publicist, and has never advertised his line; yet his diffidence seems only to enhance his cachet among fashion editors and insiders. Vogue sponsored his first runway show, in 2002, and that same year he won the C.F.D.A. Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent. Since moving to Paris, in 2003, Owens has been embraced by local arbiters of style with a passion rarely accorded a non-homegrown designer, especially an American. As the Times recently reported, “French critics laud Mr. Owens’s challenging designs. French editors photograph them all constantly. French women buy them with religious fervor.” Last fall, Owens won a National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. He appeared at the ceremony, which was held at the museum, on Fifth Avenue, in a black leather motorcycle jacket, and his speech consisted of a few barely audible sentences, in which he said little more than “Thanks.”

As Owens conducted his fitting with Valentine, Lamy appeared in his office carrying a copy of an Italian fashion magazine, which contained a feature on Owens’s clothes, titled “Elegance Barbare.” Lamy, who is sixty-three and once practiced law in Paris, helps design Owens’s line of furs, Palais Royal. (His business now includes, in addition to the fur and furniture lines and the Rick Owens label, for men and women, a line of mid-priced women’s wear, Lilies.) Lamy is also the inspiration for many of his designs. A petite, dark-skinned woman with an ageless, elfin face, she was dressed in a black fur vest, thick black tights, and a pair of Owens’s “mega-turbo” ankle boots—a high platform wedge with a cloven toe and a leather protrusion at the back of the heel. Her stylishly dishevelled hair was hennaed, her fingers were tattooed in blue ink, and her arms were ringed from wrist to elbow in gold, bone, and ivory bracelets. She approached Owens with tottering steps, trailing a wake of musky perfume and cigarette smoke. She smiled, revealing two gold-plated front teeth, and held out the photo spread. “ ’Ave you seen zis, Reek?” she asked, in a French accent that is nearly impenetrable despite the fact that she spent twenty-eight years living in Los Angeles, many of them as the owner and hostess of Les Deux Cafés, a popular Hollywood night spot, in the late nineties. (Lamy also performed for her customers, crooning Langston Hughes poems in a raspy voice to the accompaniment of a jazz ensemble.) Owens, who was sewing a complicated fold of drapery on the front of a dress, peered briefly at the magazine, and said, “Huh. I’ll have to give that to my mom.” Then he went back to his work.

After Lamy left the room, Owens said that he had known her for two years before he could make out a word she said. They met in Los Angeles and have been together for eighteen years, but have been married only since 2006. Lamy, Owens said, is a “mesmerizing sphinx.” He went on, “I’m so fascinated by someone who acts completely on instinct and feelings, where I’m so pragmatic and sensible and kind of—compared to her—boring and conservative.”

He stood up and watched Valentine strut down the length of the room, a swath of gray-and-white striped silk floating behind her. “In Catholic school, I always loved that aesthetic of all those robes dragging in those dusty temples, with Jesus and the disciples and all that,” he said. “It was very exotic and very alluring to me in my very safe little world of small-town California. When I look around here in the studio, I see wanting to re-create those dusty temples and robes and stuff.”

Owens’s parents always come to Paris to attend his shows, and they appeared at his studio that afternoon, after having spent the morning sightseeing and shopping. An only child, Owens was brought up in Porterville, an agricultural town about a hundred and fifty miles north of Los Angeles, where his parents still live. His father, John, retired as a social worker with the local welfare department; his mother, Connie—for ConcepciÓn—is from Puebla, Mexico, and worked as a schoolteacher. They met in Mexico, in 1958, when John was teaching English in Puebla, after a stint in college on the G.I. Bill. “My parents are very, very conservative,” Owens told me. “But they’re mega-turbo sweet.”

Connie, a striking woman of seventy-five, who has Owens’s large, expressive eyes, sat watching her son work for several hours, often sighing appreciatively over his designs. She also took photographs, which she would later assemble into a carefully indexed album. At her home in Porterville, she maintains an archive of more than six hundred magazines that mention Owens. Connie is a gifted seamstress, who, as a young woman, often reproduced, without the aid of patterns, dresses that she saw in shopwindows. She told me that at eighteen Owens, who had just learned to sew, produced a dress with cutouts—a creation so complicated that she had no idea how he had done it. But she disavowed any direct influence on his fashion line. She retrieved a photograph album from her purse. “I dressed him until he was thirteen or fourteen,” she said, pointing to pictures of Owens as a seven-year-old in knee socks and shorts, and as a teen-ager in a brown suit and tie. “I always dressed him like a little gentleman.” Connie added that Owens’s memories of this period are not entirely happy. “He always said that Porterville was a prison.”

John Owens, a youthful eightysix-year-old with a white brush mustache and small blue eyes, spent the afternoon at a laptop computer in a corner of the studio, engaging in vigorous debate on the Internet about affirmative action, abortion, and gay marriage—all of which he opposes. John, who had hoped that his son might become an architect, said that he had had reservations about Owens’s career as “a male designer of women’s clothing.” The two had many conflicts when Owens was growing up but have drawn closer as Owens has become successful. “He’s the most adorable Nazi,” Owens told me. “What can I do about it? I don’t want to patronize him by saying it’s amusing, but I can’t help but laugh at, like, the contrast between him and me.”

Still, tensions persist. Two days later, on the day of Owens’s show, more than a dozen runway models arrived at the studio for a final fitting. John shook his head. “These aren’t my type of women at all,” he said. “I like them a lot curvier—shapely.” Owens, overhearing, asked him to repeat what he’d said.

John went on, in a voice loud enough for Owens to hear, saying that he respected his son’s “discipline and determination,” but that his clothes are “too avant-garde for me.” He added, “Rick is the rebel. He’s a born nonconformist. I feel he’s rebelling against some of the wrong things. What he rebels against is the establishment.”

Owens’s upbringing was by no means conventional, despite his parents’ conservatism. His father’s interests ranged from Buddhism to astrology, and he did not allow a television in the house until Owens was sixteen. He required his son to read canonical works of literature and philosophy—Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, Confucius—and to listen to classical music. “I developed this method of child-rearing after reading Thomas Wolfe’s statement ‘You can’t go home again,’ ” John told me. “I always interpreted that to mean it’s because you outgrow things. Well, I always wanted to expose Rick to things he couldn’t grow out of.”

As a boy, Owens often resented this regimen of enforced cultural appreciation, but he has since come to value it. “I have so much to be grateful for because of that,” he told me. “No TV, and all those books and records. It’s like we were on a desert island in Porterville, and all we had was Debussy, Wagner, Proust, Huysmans, Pierre Loti. And they were stored in the basement, like a bunker. There’s something very insulated about that life that has stayed with me. Because my life is still like that: I don’t go outside of my personal interests, my personal nucleus of people, much.” Owens attributes elements of his fashion aesthetic to the art and literature that his father exposed him to—and he has tried to convince John of this. “I told him, ‘The reason I’m so into this is because I remember you showing me Japanese haiku and Japanese images, books of Japanese pictures; that’s why I have this austerity that appeals to me,’ ” Owens recalled. “I always loved how the Japanese appreciated things that were damaged; they would elevate the idea of something damaged and make it beautiful, and I said, ‘That is so all about what I am. And that’s because of you.’ ”

Owens attended Catholic school from first grade through seventh grade. “It offered me an element of exoticism in my life,” he said. “I prayed earnestly. I don’t think I ever really rejected it violently. After a while, I just kind of thought, Oh, that wasn’t really for me, was it?” He liked high school much less and skipped many classes to smoke pot and listen to Led Zeppelin with friends. He graduated in 1979 and moved to Los Angeles, where he studied fine arts at the Otis-Parsons Art Institute. He was captivated by the work of the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. “He was my first big idol, because it was all about insulation and protection, and it was very military, kind of,” Owens said. But he soon realized that he lacked the discipline that he believed was necessary to become an artist. “I got intimidated by it,” he said. “It was too intense—like entering the priesthood.”

He left Otis-Parsons after two years, to study pattern-cutting at a trade college. He began creating costumes and sets for local artists and performers, members of what he has called “the wicked Hollywood hustler-bar world.” For four years, he worked in knockoff houses in Los Angeles, copying in cheap fabrics the work of well-known fashion designers. The experience proved invaluable. Many designers never master the difficult art of pattern-cutting, and the originality and sophistication of Owens’s clothes—his ability to plant seams in unexpected places and to hang fabrics on the bias so that the cross grain clings to or drapes dramatically from the body—derive from his years in the knockoff mills. “Picasso did classic figure drawing in the beginning, and then, after that, he abstracted,” Owens told me. “You can’t convincingly get abstract until you really know the fundamentals. It’s the same thing with pattern-making. You can’t start distorting things unless you kind of know what you’re doing.” As Cathy Horyn wrote last week in the Times, in an admiring review of Owens’s Fall 2008 collection, “A designer who controls his pattern making can say the most with his clothes. It’s just like a writer with language.”

In 1988, Owens’s boyfriend at the time helped him obtain a job as a pattern-cutter at a Los Angeles sportswear company owned by Lamy, who also owned a French bistro, Café des Artistes. She had married an experimental filmmaker, Richard Newton, and had a daughter, Scarlett. Owens worked for two years at Lamy’s company before they began an affair. Owens left his boyfriend, Lamy left her husband, and they moved in together. Strapped for cash, they stayed in cheap hotels, including one that Owens’s friend the intersex multimedia artist Vaginal Davis calls a “fist-fuck hotel,” off Hollywood Boulevard. Owens and Lamy drank and used drugs prolifically, inspired in part by the rock musicians they admired—Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, and David Bowie. “It’s also Baudelaire and Tennessee Williams,” Owens said. “It’s just the whole idea of excess and the phrase ‘A candle that burns at both ends might burn shorter, but it burns brighter.’ ” Lamy, Owens says, was “an enthusiastic drinker,” but, he adds, “she never went as deep as I did and was the one to call the private nurses when I got too bad.”

Owens and Lamy have been sober for more than a decade, but his memories of that time continue to influence his work. “I want it to look used and damaged, and I think that’s why women over forty relate,” he said. “We all dabbled in drugs. We had moments of beauty but also times of problems. It’s not a sparkling disco minidress that’s shiny and silver and perfect and holding everything in place. Life is not like that.” Last fall, Owens published a book of photographs, “L’Ai-Je Bien Descendu?” (“How Was My Descent?”), which includes a self-portrait that shows him slumped, shirtless, at a table in front of a bottle of vodka and a handgun. Another image shows him with the gun’s barrel in his mouth and blood—which Owens later painted in—exploding from the back of his head. He regards the suicide photograph as an homage to his days as a drug user and had it printed on a silk scarf, which sells for about ninety dollars at his boutique in the Palais Royal, near the Louvre.

Even during his most dissolute period, Owens never doubted that he would eventually leave the knockoff business and create his own line. “I just assumed that I’d do this for a while, then I’d do my own thing,” he said. In 1994, when he was sober, he bought inexpensive fabric remnants—silk georgette, cotton ribs, cotton jersey—at a downtown jobber and, after washing and dying them, sculpted them into unexpectedly sophisticated T-shirts, skirts, and dresses. Perhaps the most upscale stores in Los Angeles was Maxfield, on Melrose Avenue, which specialized in clothes by experimental designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons. Owens brought his clothes to Maxfield, but the store’s buyer wasn’t available to look at them. “So I went to the next best store, Charles Gallay”—the first retailer in Los Angeles to carry Versace, Montana, Mugler, and Martin Margiela (designers known for what Owens calls “the really extreme stuff”). Gallay arranged an exclusive deal with Owens. “I said, ‘I’m broke. Can you pay fifty per cent up front?’ And they did,” Owens recalled. “That’s how I did it. I never got an insurance policy, I never had employment benefits, I didn’t do taxes, I didn’t take out a loan. I had one sewer full time and then two sewers when it was more of a crunch. I was barely, barely surviving and we weren’t making that many clothes, but I had no overhead, so I was able to do it.” A few years later, when the Charles Gallay store closed, Owens negotiated an exclusive deal with Tommy Perse, the owner of Maxfield.

Lisa Love, a West Coast editor of Vogue, says that Owens’s move from Gallay to Maxfield coincided with a change in his work. “At Maxfield, he moved into the more high-end fabrics and the more tortured designs, draping leathers and cashmeres and fur, and making these incredible T-shirts,” Love said. “The cashmeres were so luxurious, but then he would throw them in a pot of dye. I mean, no one treats fabric like that. Machine-washing the leather! Los Angeles was and is, mostly, a very jeans kind of world. But his stuff was different from stuff that was coming out of Los Angeles. And New York, too, for that matter. Very body-hugging, clingy, not conventional. It was Morticia-like—witchy at the same time as elegant and goth. Street, but it looked so great on so many women.”

By this time, Owens and Lamy were living in a former five-and-dime storefront on Las Palmas, a gritty side street off Hollywood Boulevard. They stripped the interior walls and ceilings to the plaster and furnished their rooms with a thrift-store version of Owens’s Beuys-inspired beds and couches, using flannel Army blankets and cashmere to drape the walls and windows. The sidewalks in front of their building were a gathering place for runaways, transsexual hookers, and drug addicts, who provided Owens with a constant source of inspiration.

In the early nineties, Lamy’s sportswear company declared bankruptcy, and she devoted her attention to Café des Artistes, which became so successful that, in 1997, she opened a larger restaurant, across the street from their home on Las Palmas. She bought a crumbling former crack house and the adjoining parking lot and turned them into a vine-draped bistro that she called Les Deux Cafés. The restaurant was popular with directors and actors, including Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Nicole Kidman. “It wasn’t this weird, new, celebrity-for-celebrity’s-sake nonsense that you have now,” Courtney Love, who was also a regular, told me. “The vibe was just cooler.” Lamy, dressed in clothes by Owens, often performed the duties of hostess. “She looked cool,” Love recalled. “I asked her, ‘Who made that skirt?’ ” Soon, Love and other celebrities were visiting Owens’s studio, across the street. His sleazily glamorous leather jacket, which had ribbing along the inner seams of the arms to make them hug the body, was particularly prized by Lamy’s customers. It managed to seem both luxurious and casual, an effect that Owens achieved by machine-washing and tumble-drying the leather until it resembled desiccated skin. “It was real popular with rockers or people willing to take that kind of chance,” Love said. “Androgynous women and power lesbians.” Owens’s jacket and his tattered T-shirts began to appear in photo spreads in art and fashion magazines.

In 1998, Julie Gilhart, the fashion director at Barneys, saw a photograph of an Owens T-shirt in an obscure fashion magazine whose name she no longer recalls. Gilhart had no idea how to contact Owens, but she tore out the page and kept it on her desk. A year later, Barneys’ creative director, Simon Doonan, who had been a window dresser at Maxfield, told Gilhart that Owens lived in Los Angeles. Gilhart began to buy his line for Barneys, where it became a top seller. I was in Barneys last spring when a shipment arrived on the fifth floor. The rest of the store was nearly empty, but women crowded four deep to get at Owens’s clothes and bought four or five pieces each. (Prices range from two hundred and fifty dollars for a ribbed tank top to seven thousand seven hundred and forty-five dollars for a watersnake jacket.) I mentioned what I’d seen to Gilhart, who said that it was hardly unusual. “I love Rick because he’s so perfectly Barneys,” she told me. “He doesn’t advertise, he isn’t all over the magazines, yet he appeals to a luxury customer. Even though he’s not seen as a luxury brand, he is. He’s the essence of insider exclusivity.”

In 2003, Henri Bendel, the Fifth Avenue department store, created a Rick Owens salon on its top floor. “Anyone who loved Rick would be up there looking through the racks,” Sally Singer, the fashion-news director at Vogue, told me. “You always thought it would go on sale, and it wouldn’t, because people would buy it at full price.” Singer was among the first members of the fashion establishment to promote Owens’s work. She lives in the Chelsea Hotel—where she recently held a candlelit dinner for Owens and fifty friends and admirers—but as a teen-ager she spent time in Los Angeles. “I know the clubs and the music that he cared about, and the kind of goth, speed-metal, slightly distressed, and worn edge that he brings to luxurious things,” she told me. “But I think I also really respond to the classical imagery in his clothes. This is a deeply cultured person putting out these things. He knows the history of armor, he knows the history of draping, and the Grecian stuff.”

By 2001, Owens’s business had grown too large for him to continue producing clothes in his home studio. So he signed a deal with EBA, an Italian sales agency, now a division of Naxeco, that had represented other avant-garde designers, mainly Europeans, including Olivier Theyskens and Ann Demeulemeester. EBA’s president, Luca Ruggeri, and its C.E.O., Ruggeri’s sister-in-law, Elsa Lanzo, were introduced to Owens’s work by a French buyer. “He was doing something completely different—what we would wear,” Ruggeri, a tall man who often dresses in Owens’s menswear line of distressed-leather jackets and sharp-shouldered blazers, told me. EBA helped Owens find a manufacturer for his clothes and sold them to stores, and in 2003 Owens became the agency’s principal client. “They didn’t know me very well at the beginning, and it wasn’t a very big collection—maybe twelve pieces—so nobody asked that many questions, because it wasn’t a big investment,” Owens said. “It went well, so, as we grew, nobody questioned what I wanted to do, or how much money I was going to spend.” Even now, Owens told me, Ruggeri and Lanzo don’t see the clothes until the week before they start selling them. “We don’t talk about it, I don’t show them anything,” Owens said. “They’re both incredible,” he added. “I couldn’t be luckier.”

Owens’s arrangement with EBA was considered unusual at the time. “At that moment, all the drama in fashion was about how to join a conglomerate,” Singer told me. “Who was getting the big jobs, who was taking over the big houses, who was going to get backing from the Gucci Group. Stella McCartney signed up, Alexander McQueen signed up, Balenciaga was bought by Gucci.” In the fall of 2001, Singer included Owens in a story that she wrote for Vogue about a small group of mostly European designers who had refused to sell their labels to a conglomerate, and she arranged to have Owens photographed by Annie Leibovitz. In the image, he appears shirtless, in unbuttoned black jeans, on the edge of a bed in a low-rent motel room. Standing next to him is his friend Kembra Pfahler, the lead singer of the New York punk band the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, dressed in a classic Owens ensemble: an intricately gathered, floor-length, sand-colored skirt and a long-sleeved T-shirt. In order to persuade Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, to feature Owens prominently in the magazine, Singer and Love arranged for him to visit Wintour at her suite at the Ritz, in Paris. “He came with a long Army duffelbag full of clothes, and a model, and he just pulled them out one after another and put them on the model in front of Anna,” Singer recalled. “It was eight or nine in the morning. We had this fantasy that that was an early hour for Rick Owens. I don’t actually know if it was.”

Wintour published the Leibovitz photograph as a double-page spread, and five months later Vogue sponsored Owens’s first fashion show, in New York. Within a few months, Owens had won a Perry Ellis Award, and the following year he was hired as the artistic director for Revillon Frères, the Paris fur company, founded in 1723. The label, like many other upscale furriers, had attracted a following in the nineteen-seventies and eighties but had since declined in popularity. Owens, for his first collection, which he presented in the summer of 2003, made puffy ski jackets lined with sable, coats trimmed with hand-knotted ostrich feathers, and a jacket with a mink torso, fox sleeves, and a goat-and-horsetail fringe. “Just as surely as John Galliano smashed the restrained, bourgeois image at Dior, Owens knocked the stuffing and the stuffiness out of furs,” Suzy Menkes, the influential fashion critic for the International Herald Tribune, wrote in a review. (In 2006, Revillon was sold and Owens left the company. Last year, he launched his own fur line, Palais Royal.)

With each new favorable notice, Owens seems more determined to prove his independence from the fashion establishment. In May, 2002, he published a grainy, black-and-white self-portrait in the British magazine i-D, in which he appeared on all fours, clad only in a pair of black leather chaps. Facing him, in a crudely pieced-together double exposure, was another image of him, urinating into his doppelgänger’s mouth. The photograph, as Guy Trebay noted in the Times, was not likely to appear in Vogue “during any of our lives.” In 2006, Owens opened his boutique in the Palais Royal—the enclosed arcade where Louis XIV lived as a boy—and later installed, near the front windows, overlooking the colonnade, a life-size, anatomically correct nude wax sculpture of himself, made by artisans who supply works to Madame Tussauds. The sculpture, which Owens showed at a trade fair in Florence, was equipped with tubing enabling it to release a jet of fake urine. Owens refrained from activating the pee function when he installed the work in his store, and he draped the figure in a black velvet cloak. Even so, he says, “anyone who expresses interest can see what’s under the cape.” He doesn’t worry that his provocativeness will alienate customers or critics. “I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea,” he told me, “and I don’t want to be.”

On the morning of the day of Owens’s Spring 2008 show, about twenty models arrived at his studio for a final fitting. A makeup artist and a hairdresser discussed with him how to arrange the models’ faces and hair. His chief stylist, Panos Yiapanis, and his assistant, Asha Mines, collected photographs of the models in their respective looks, which they tacked to a large board. As the mood in the studio grew more frantic, Justinian Kfoury, a fashion agent and a friend of Owens’s from Los Angeles, announced that the “kadringle” had begun—his term for the frenzy, fuelled by adrenaline and terror, that invariably precedes a runway show. The only person who seemed immune to the kadringle was Owens. He strolled calmly through the studio, answering questions in his unhurried California drawl.

Not far away, at the École des Beaux-Arts, workers hung lights above a central runway in the main hall—a soaring space with a curved glass ceiling and, on the upper walls, reproductions of murals by Michelangelo. Around four o’clock, Owens’s models assembled backstage, at the foot of a wide flight of stairs. Their long hair was rolled and pinned under in high buns, and smoothed away from their foreheads to create an aerodynamic effect. Their faces were made to look pale with foundation, and their eyebrows concealed with makeup. Photographers, fashion reporters, and friends of Owens’s gathered on a landing at the top of the stairs. A reporter from the Times interviewed Owens’s father. “I’m enjoying the reflected glory of being Rick Owens’s parent!” he exclaimed afterward.

Owens arrived at about five o’clock and lingered near the runway, watching as the technicians finished installing the lights. He was dressed in black jeans, a long, dark, military-style coat, and a pair of boots with five-inch heels. Gazing around the room, he considered his career. “I don’t know if anyone can start the way I did anymore,” he said. “There are so many designers now—they’re the new rock bands.” Then he joined Yiapanis and Mines backstage, where they were helping the models into the clothes. Apart from a few who were wearing Owens’s narrow black leather jackets, most of the models were dressed in tunics and droopy shorts made from layers of semi-transparent organza and gazar, a loosely woven silk fabric printed with a pattern of gray and white stripes that Owens had designed on a computer. The tunics were wrapped around the models’ torsos like Möbius strips or stiffly folded origami. All the models wore Owens’s mega-turbo boots, along with black socks emblazoned across the top with the title of the collection: Creatch, short for “creature,” a nickname that Owens’s friends gave him as a teen-ager. The flowing yet rigorously structured tunics reflected Owens’s love of early-twentieth-century designers such as Vionnet, Fortuny, and Grès, and the low-slung shorts conjured skater street wear. When I asked Owens about his inspiration for the collection, he said, “I just think, Elegant monsters.”

At 6:30 P.M., the soundtrack began to play from beyond a high white scrim separating the backstage area from the runway. Despite his enthusiasm for Iggy, Bowie, American heavy metal, and German opera, Owens says that he dislikes the “frantic” music that many designers use at shows, and he had chosen a piece by a London-based techno musician called Rex the Dog. He had asked a friend to slow the music to half speed—to one beat per second. “I hope it’ll force people to slow their eye and look at the clothing,” he told me. Owens said that the clanging, distorted electronic noise that filled the hall sounded to him “kind of like a stoned ice-cream truck.” As the models hurried to form a line before stepping onto the runway, Owens, who had removed his coat and was wearing a black wife-beater T-shirt, stood at the edge of the scrim, just out of view of the audience, and adjusted each outfit.

The collection had taken Owens months to conceive and manufacture. The show lasted fifteen minutes. Afterward, fans appeared backstage to congratulate him. Courtney Love, wearing a Rick Owens black leather jacket lined in white shearling and his mega-turbo boots, embraced him. But Owens didn’t linger. Accompanied by Lamy and his parents, he soon left the building to attend a party hosted by the vintage-clothing retailer Didier Ludot, in front of his boutique in the colonnade at the Palais Royal. Owens stayed at the party for only a few minutes, then left to have dinner at Davé, a claustrophobic Chinese restaurant that serves middling food but has, for more than twenty years, attracted top designers and fashion power brokers. “If you look at all the photographs on the walls, it’s all Lagerfeld and everybody,” Owens said. “I was a little intimidated, and I never would have gone if Michèle hadn’t made me go. You know, Michèle doesn’t care about anything.”

Owens and his party, which included Gareth Pugh, a twenty-six-year-old British designer of punk- and glam-inspired clothing, whom Lamy had started promoting, were seated at a coveted table near the restaurant’s entrance. At the next table, to Owens’s unrestrained excitement, was the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo. A few minutes after Owens’s group sat down, Courtney Love arrived. She pulled up a chair, squeezed in beside John Owens, and began to describe an abortive plan to buy Kate Moss’s house in London. But no one was listening. John Owens’s spoon had gone missing, and he was complaining vociferously. Owens tried to flag down a waiter.

A new spoon was procured from Davé Chung, the restaurant’s owner, and Love finished her anecdote. (“I couldn’t buy the house when I saw that Kate’s walk-in closet was bigger than her kid’s bedroom!”) Soon, she and John Owens were deep in conversation about a psychological disorder that John had been reading about on the Internet. “It’s a condition called apotemnophilia,” he explained. “It’s a compulsion people feel to have parts of their body surgically amputated. Arms. Legs. Apparently, it is driven by certain sexual compulsions.”

Love nodded enthusiastically. “Well, you know Syd Barrett? One of the original members of Pink Floyd?”

“No, I don’t believe I do,” John said.

“Well, he was amazing,” Love said. “Great, great musician. But he went completely crazy and ate his own fingers off.” (Barrett was known to have exhibited psychotic behavior, but biographies make no mention of him having eaten his digits.)

John considered this for a moment. Then he said, “I’m not sure that that, technically, would qualify as a true case of apotemnophilia.”

Owens, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation, fought back laughter. Later, he told me how much he had relished the sight of his father and Love together at Davé—and Rei Kawakubo just inches away. “That’s when I think, My life is perfect,” Owens said.

Before the dinner broke up, Love announced that she planned to be “highly selective” in her attendance at the rest of the fashion shows that week. “But I have to come and support Rick,” she said. “I always support Rick.”

John looked puzzled. “Support?” he said. “How do you mean? You put money—?”

“She means emotionally, Dad,” Owens interrupted.

“Oh,” John said, and resumed eating.

Fashion Week was not quite over for Owens. Four nights later, he attended the opening for his furniture line, at the Galerie Philippe Jousse, on the Left Bank. Owens’s parents drove with him to the gallery in a chauffeured S.U.V. John, who was sitting in the back seat, asked Owens how his fashion show had been received by the critics.

“Well,” Owens replied, “Suzy Menkes seemed to like it quite a bit.” (This was typical understatement. Menkes had written a rave review, in which she complimented Owens for achieving new elegance and sophistication without sacrificing his street edge.)

“Any criticisms at all, Rick?” John asked.

“Are you looking for any?” Owens replied.

“Well,” John said. “Yeah.”

“I’m afraid not, Dad,” Owens said with a chuckle. A moment later, he added, “Well, Style.com didn’t like the low-crotch pants much.”

“I see,” John said. But there was no note of triumph in his voice. “I always worry about the possibility of him losing his touch,” he had told me a few days earlier. In 2004, Owens was offered ten million dollars for his label, and John worried that his son had done the wrong thing by saying no. “You get to those figures, and you have to give it some serious thought,” John said. “If you sell out, you don’t have to worry about it, you’re set for life.” I later repeated John’s comment to Owens, who smiled. “And that’s why me and my dad, much as I love him, will always never quite see eye to eye on things,” he said.

At the Galerie Jousse, men and women, dressed in Rick Owens designs, chatted among pieces from his furniture line—an unsettling collection of cube-shaped chairs, sofas, and side tables upholstered in mink, sable, and felt, some of them decorated with deer antlers. Owens stood in a corner, surrounded by friends, including Love. Someone suggested that the group have dinner at Brasserie Lipp. Owens approached his parents, who were sitting on one of his couches, a long benchlike piece upholstered in glossy mink.

“Everybody wants to go to Brasserie Lipp,” Owens told them, sitting down between his father and his mother. “It’s so hip and fabulous,” he added wearily. “Can we just go home?”

His parents said yes. ♦

John Colapinto became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2006. He is the author of “Undone.”